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Chapter 279 Prosperous Chapter Gu
On the day all nine nodes of the web were activated, Han Lu created a timeline of all the milestones of 402 from its inception to the present day.
The wall is twenty-seven meters long, stretching from the company entrance to the conference room at the end of the corridor. The earliest record is on the far left, printed on ordinary white paper, the corners already slightly curled: Five people, seven computers, survived. The latest record is on the far right, unframed, written directly on the wall by Han Lu with a marker: The nine nodes of the network are connected; control of the solar system has been transferred; humanity is no longer a solitary species on Blue Planet.
It took Han Lu, Chen Hao, Liu Wei, and Fang Ze two weekends to create the timeline. They unearthed copies of emails, meeting minutes, draft contracts, their first bank statement, and their first client's thank-you letter from several years ago. Many of these items had originally been stored in a cardboard box at the bottom of Han Lu's cabinet, and the papers were slightly yellowed when they were found. Han Lu sealed each item in a transparent folder and pasted them on the wall chronologically.
Since Zuo Cheng graduated, over three hundred records have been posted on the timeline. The first Tianqiong satellite's orbital insertion time stamp—before dawn, Zhou Henian stood before the only lit screen in the control room. The first IoT device exceeding 100,000 units—Liu Wei sent a string of exclamation marks in the group chat. The moment the first AI branch was activated—Shen Yiming stared at the green confirmation on the panel for a full three minutes in the lab. The first drone delivery order—the day it flew out of the mountains, He Qiang called, saying, "You flew a journey that takes forty people an hour in half an hour." The first mass-produced vehicle equipped with the 402 autonomous driving system rolled off the assembly line—Wei Dongsheng signed the form at the end of the line. The first space photovoltaic satellite entered orbit—Li Guodong said at three in the morning in the Jiuquan Gobi Desert, "Twenty-three years." The first rocket recovery. The first brain-computer interface surgery—Zhang Wei opened his eyes. The first establishment of quantum supremacy. The first ISO international standard passed by vote. The first Sahara expedition—Chen Xinghe. The first Mars probe landing—the holographic cube. The first self-sustaining nuclear fusion combustion, Ge Lilin's worn-out notebook. The first Web node activation, the Sentinel's options A and B. The first consciousness network node, Gu Feng says, "Your consciousness signature is beautiful." The first Titan routing table, the home port. The first Web control protocol, you are no longer a guest, you are the master.
Next to each record was a name. The most crucial person in that milestone.
Chen Hao stood in front of the rocket recovery record. The record contained a photograph taken from a surveillance camera, displayed at the window of the tracking station next to the launch site. His hand, gripping the armrest of his chair, was visible, his knuckles completely white. He stared at the photo for a long time, then reached out and touched himself in the picture with his fingertip.
"I used to think rocket recovery was a world record," he said. "Looking back now, it was just a building block."
Fang Ze stood in front of the record for the first NX-40 chip for a long time. The record wasn't a photograph, but the chip's first-edition packaging drawing, densely packed with dimensions, and only his employee number and a date in the lower right corner. He turned to look at Zuo Cheng.
"This chip is now inside the Webweaver's robotic arm. On the surface of Titan, 1.4 billion kilometers away. It's still running." His voice was as flat as usual, but this time the pause was a little off. "I never imagined it would go this far when I built it."
Yu Ying paused before the record of the first brain-computer interface surgery. She took a pen from her pocket and added a line below the entry that read, "First patient: Zhang Wei, immediately regained sensation in his right leg post-surgery." The 3,174,528th surgery. The number of everyone saved by Interstellar Neuroscience from Zhang Wei to today. After writing, she closed the pen and took a step back. Not technical parameters, not a milestone, but the number of survivors. Three million people who previously couldn't walk, couldn't pick things up, couldn't feel someone holding their hand.
Shen Yiming stood in front of the quantum supremacy record without saying much. He simply borrowed a pen from Han Lu and wrote a line on the blank space next to it: "Next project, the eleventh branch." Then he continued walking forward.
Zuo Cheng walked from the far left to the far right of the Time Wall. Twenty-seven meters, it took him nearly seven minutes. Each step tread on the corridor tiles, the wall displaying line after line of the past. He didn't stop at several, not because they weren't important, but because they were too heavy. The Sahara Ruins, forty-three percent of Chen Xinghe's history—he lingered longest at that line. The Sentinel's Five-Layer Protocol, options A and B, option C—he hadn't told anyone his hands were trembling while reading that section before it was revealed. The Titan Ice Surface, the touch of his fingertips. The first record in the Web, the sentence written four billion years ago on a planet before it had oceans.
He stopped at the very end. Han Lu hadn't pasted anything else on the far end of the wall yet; there was only a blank cardboard card pinned there, a size larger than the records next to it, probably reserved for him. Zuo Cheng knew that was for him.
"Volume Three ended with all five branches completed. At that time, I felt 402 had reached its peak," Zuo Cheng said. "Volume Four ended with ten branches, the technology tree entering its flourishing period, all nine nodes of the solar system lit up, and humanity mastering interstellar travel, planetary energy, and consciousness networks. Standing here, I realize the peak keeps shifting backward." He paused. "It won't stop. Because from beginning to end, we weren't climbing a mountain. We were building a mountain."
Han Lu took a marker out of her pocket and handed it to him. Zuo Cheng took it and wrote two lines on the blank card at the very end of the time wall.
Volume Five. The Universe.
The night after the unveiling, Zuo Cheng sat alone in his office, flipping through the note under the card twice. Then he opened a drawer and pulled out a yellowed piece of paper from the very back. The paper was brittle, the ink had smudged, but the words on it were still legible. Ten years ago, in the incubator, he had scribbled this down after the day's group meeting, hunched over a desk he'd just bought from a secondhand market. Survive, and then see how far you can go.
He placed the two slips of paper, the yellowed one and the one that had just been posted on the wall that day, side by side on the table, took a picture, and sent it to Yu Ying.
Yu Ying replied a minute later. "I've walked a long way. I haven't arrived yet."
Zuo Cheng replied: Yes. We haven't arrived yet.
The satellites outside the window streaked across the sky, from the first to the last, as bright as every night, as bright as the first night. The ten-branched canopy rotated slowly where he couldn't see, the nine nodes of the web glowing faintly in nine locations within the solar system. Han Lu's time wall glowed quietly in the late-night corridor, the twenty-seven meters between the first and last lines illuminated by the corridor lights as a pale golden line. He turned off his phone screen, sat for a long time, then picked up the yellowed paper and read it one last time. The words on the paper were written by himself ten years ago, when he had nothing but four brothers and a system. He wouldn't have known that ten years later, the canopy of the technology tree could touch the boundary of the web, wouldn't have known that a network could transmit perception without language, wouldn't have known that someone left him a message four billion years ago. But there was one thing he knew from the very beginning.
Survive, and then see how far you can go.